Chapter IV: Part 4

Today Maurras directs--with the partnership of the truculent Leon Daudet--the newspaper, _Action Française_, which flies on its mast the following inscription: “_Chef de la Maison de France, j’en revendique tous les droits, j’en assume toutes les responsabilités, j’en accepte tous les devoirs_” over the name of “_Le duc de Guise, héritier des quarante Rois qui en mille ans firent la France_.” With Maurras’s bellicosities, his fanning of national and racial hatreds, I am not now concerned, nor should I like in any case to defend them. It is more germane to this book to quote from him on tradition. “Not all traditions,” he says, “are equal.... Amongst all others one tradition offers itself, of which the conspicuous character is its almost complete conformity with those principles of taste which express humanity raised to its highest point. We see it come to birth in Ionia as from the ashes of Homer; it continues under the olive trees of Cephisus. Roman sages who adopt it make a new home for it. The middle ages do not banish it completely either from France or from the towns of Italy. It reforms itself and occupies the whole of Europe; but it is Paris now, as Athens once, that preserves it. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, humanism and the classical spirit, refined to an Attic point of taste, never lacked representatives among us, or an élite worthy of understanding and loving it.” This Græco-Latin classical tradition, which belongs to France, Maurras goes on to say, “surpasses all others. It reveals, in fact, a force of life equal in flame, in coloring, in simple brutality or refined delicacy to whatever the rest of the world can show, from the steppes of Russia to the shores of Guinea; and as no other popular tradition can vie with it in sensibility, it defies forever all its rivals, in the order and luminosity of its writings, in the great generality of their style. The works of this tradition are rightly called Humane Letters, in that they interest the whole world.” Finally, he exclaims: “But the pursuit of the classical tradition includes other things than gods and goddesses. It authorizes a scrupulous and passionate criticism. Far from freezing the senses, it excites, begets creation. Even among ourselves, above all among ourselves, there is much to be done. We can dream of tragedies nearer to nature, more direct and simple than those of Racine. The heroic vein of Corneille leaves room for a poet who should be wiser than he. The reader will be surprised if I add that what we lack especially is lyric poetry! Consider how little can be preserved from the romantic lumber-room. We must bring things back to Malherbe. There was once a literary criticism, there can be again, yet finer, and lead our literature to its renascence.”

Turning to the Neo-Thomists, it seems to me that Jacques Maritain is the dominant figure. He began as a student of Bergson but shortly afterwards joined the Catholic Church and today holds the position of professor of modern history and philosophy at the Institut Catholique of Paris. He grounds himself entirely on the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and his whole effort is to translate it into terms of modern life, to make it serviceable and illuminating to the man of the twentieth century. For a few years Maritain associated himself with the Action Française but withdrew when in 1927 the Pope proscribed the journal of Maurras, Daudet and Pujo.

Maritain writes with an austere clarity. A fiery faith burns in the depths of his thought and makes his most abstract pages strangely intense. He is an utterly ruthless opponent of what he conceives to be modern errors, and, like the American Humanists, he considers Romanticism as the source of many of these illusions. “The word romanticism,” he notes and I recommend his definition to the reader, “may give rise to many confusions. I am aware that there have been all kinds of things, even very good things, in the complex movement classed under this name. But nothing is so idle as to argue about words and recast their definition to suit your subject; and in spite of everything usage has adequately settled the meaning of this one. In so far as it signifies a religious eviction of reason and its works, the sacred unbridling of sensation, the holy parade of self and the adoration of primitive natural instinct, pantheism as theology, and emotional stimulus as the rule of life, it must be confessed that Rousseau, by his mystical naturalism, is at the direct source of such a spiritual evil.”

Again, like the New Humanists, Maritain attacks the ubiquitous sway of modern science on the ground that science, unconfined to its proper rôle, dehumanizes man. In his essay on Descartes, who to Maritain founded the principle of the deep inhumanity of modern science, we may read: “In the higher order of Cognition the Cartesian reformation gave the irretrievable stability of the things of the spirit to the moral attitude of turning towards perishable goods. See what the great name of Science has become. It is today hardly applied to anything but the knowledge of matter, and science, _par excellence_, is regarded by most modern thinkers as belonging to a museum. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above wisdom. From the mountain of its excellence it has descried all the kingdoms of the material universe and the glory of them, and it goes down to possess them.”

And now we come to the freelances of the classical revival, to proud polemicists like Julien Benda who never tire in the exposure of romantic follies. Benda, novelist and essayist, tenacious opponent of Bergson, has invented a name for the disease of pan-lyricism which rages in America as well as in France. He calls it “belphégorism,” for it is in his argument the worship of a false god, Belphégor or Baal-Peor as it is written in the Bible. Belphégorism briefly is the requirement of modern society that works of art should be _exclusively_ productive of emotions and sensations, that history should be written as a series of heart-throbs, that philosophy and science should give thrills. Belphégorism is the love of the indistinct, of the novelty purely for its own sake, of subjectivity carried as far as possible. Conversely, belphégorism hates the mind, hates discipline, hates form. Benda makes it clear that he is no objector to the lyrical in itself, but rather to the invasion by lyricism of all provinces of the intellectual life. To the softness in taste of modern French society he opposes the plastic sensibility of the great seventeenth century, the period of Descartes and Pascal, of Corneille, Molière and Racine, of Bossuet, of La Fontaine, of Madame de La Fayette.

By a plastic sensibility Benda means a sensibility, whose principal modes are sight and touch, which organizes itself about the idea of form. It loves precision and firmness. This sensibility is localized, perhaps because it involves the more highly specialized and developed nerves. It is, Benda declares, a centralized and correlated sensibility, the source of poise. In contrast he places the musical sensibility whose principal modes are hearing, taste and smell. This is a disquieting sensibility, for it consists in sensation without contour, it overflows the whole being with scattered and diffused sensation. The consciousness is decentralized. The result is the opposite of poise, being intoxication and vertigo. Modern society tends toward a musical sensibility, a tendency Benda has become seasoned in combating.

This distinction between two types of sensibility is very usable, and I shall come back to it when we take up Nietzsche’s great interpretation of the Apollo-Dionysus conflict in the final chapter. But now this exhibit of the friends of order abroad must be closed by a longish quotation from Benda’s _The Treason of the Intellectuals_ illustrating the difference between two types of humanitarianism (or more properly between Humanism and humanitarianism), a difference our New Humanists constantly insist upon. In addition Benda brings out very well a point usually overlooked by people who, perceiving the aristocratic leanings of the New Humanists, accuse them of being too disdainful of their fellow men.

“In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism[3] as a moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks.’

“I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished minds, who disavow two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is the ‘patriotic bore’ and the other ‘the universal embrace.’

“The humanitarianism[4] which holds in honor the abstract quality of what is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men. Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man, _more or less_ the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.

“Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain category of men--laborers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those interests.

“In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from moral dogmatism.”

* * * * *

Such, briefly indicated, is the general field of contemporary thought in which American Humanism fits. I deem it, however, premature and over-enthusiastic to perceive in this field the beginnings of a new renascence, and likewise I do not think the parallel between the living asserters of classical ideals and the Humanists of the Renascence should be stressed. True enough, the modern revivalists have entered into a gigantic battle to overthrow the preëminence of the dogma of Naturalism, just as the Renascence men assaulted the preëminence of petrified theological dogma, and true enough the moderns catch their vision, as did their brothers in the fifteenth century, from the ancient literatures. But it is yet to be seen whether they can do more than _defend_ the ancestral treasures, whether they can be more than a corrective force to the excesses and barbarisms of our era. Have they the potency to initiate a real transformation of modern society? Can they even arrest its downward plunge, let alone reverse its direction? Have they the hidden strength to work a miracle? The questions discourage all desires to prophesy. The only thing that can be said is that the traditionalist thinkers are making a supremely important contribution to the thought of today, that by their contribution they tend to improve the general intellectual situation, and the first step is the production of a more favorable situation, in itself a huge task, for diamond ideas about the “good life.” Meanwhile, the most that can be said about any notion of a coming renascence is that it may have the energizing value of a myth: it is perhaps akin in its tonic effect on the spirit to the conception of the general strike which Georges Sorel proclaimed should be the heroic myth of the proletariat in its long struggle.

Now if we compare the theory of American Humanists with the theories or partly worked out theories of their allies in Europe, we shall see that we have at home not the least developed and least positive form of conservatism. The Europeans either come to rest on Catholicism (Chesterton, Belloc, Massis, Maritain), which for many Americans seems impossible, involving an act of too much faith, and furthermore they feel too _psychologically_ distant from Rome; or the Europeans dedicate themselves to some political movement such as French royalism (Maurras and his disciples) which to some extent perverts their classical attitude; or finally they fall back on some personal philosophy, scarcely more than a strong predisposition in favor of the disinterested activity of the mind (Benda) or else very much in the forming and full of idiosyncrasies (Wyndham Lewis). American Humanism has not complicated itself by theological alliances, nor subordinated itself to the pursuit of definite political aims. What is striking is the extent to which it has freed itself from the personal and idiosyncratic. It exists apart from the personalities of More and Babbitt. Here is a body of general ideas, substantial yet pliable, to which all who seize the few underlying principles may resort and from which all may take a working experimental outlook on the problems of their own lives. Here is a system for the guidance of one’s thought, not for its repression and confinement. Here is an ideology too definite to be treated whimsically, but not so rigid as to be unadaptable to the taste of the individual. It has a completeness wanting in the personal philosophies of Lewis and Benda, and it does not appear to many so arbitrary as the doctrines of the Church. _Its great recommendation is that it is founded on the positive critical experimental spirit of modern times._ This in the remainder of the book I shall try to demonstrate.

VI

A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN

_“Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human
happiness_ uncomplicated _by naturistic dogmas on the one side and
religious dogmas on the other.”_--G. R. Elliott in _Humanism and
America_.

Humanism is a term that has been defined, and well defined, many times. Yet there persists in the public mind the feeling that Humanism is a portmanteau word and the New Humanists have failed to make it denote anything precise. The public is not to blame for this feeling, nor are the New Humanists responsible. Several causes may be alleged, the first being the romanticizing of the word by writers like Walter Pater. “For the essence of humanism,” Pater once wrote, “is that belief of which he (Pico della Mirandola) seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.” This is to make Humanism denote simply an all-embracing curiosity, an insatiable appetite for everything, no matter how trivial. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_ (I consider nothing human alien to me)--this widely quoted line is the motto of those who take Pater’s definition too seriously. But the line is spoken in Terence’s play as an excuse for meddling, and Babbitt comments drily that it “might serve appropriately enough as a motto for the humanitarian busybody with whom we are all so familiar nowadays, who goes around with schemes for reforming almost everything--except himself.” No, Humanism means more than a universal curiosity about one’s fellow creatures, and it does not mean humanitarianism. The humanitarians, however, have claimed the gracious word, and this is the second cause of confusion as to definition.

It is essential to see that Humanism and humanitarianism are quite distinct. “A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” to quote from Babbitt, “faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian.” Such a person--he is legion!--exalts sympathy, and expects that somehow in the coming years man’s altruistic impulses will triumph over his egoism. He is an optimist, an ardent believer in the dogma of progress, and usually a superstitious worshipper of modern science. _Exempli gratia_: Auguste Comte, Rousseau and Herder have at one time or another been hailed as “humanists,” whereas, Babbitt asserted in his first book, they are properly called humanitarian enthusiasts. So today we sometimes read in our newspapers that certain former Unitarian preachers are Humanists, despite the fact that their sermons upon examination prove to be almost pure humanitarianism, or we hear writers like the American historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, referred to as a Humanist. But Barnes, we may say in passing, would have seemed to Matthew Arnold the propagandist for a “spurious and degenerated sub-form” of Hellenism. Arnold would doubtless have dubbed this very vocal rationalist simply a Millite, a word he coined from the name of England’s famous utilitarian philosopher. Humanism, properly understood, is in fact the stern critic of philanthropic rationalists like Barnes or sentimental enthusiasts like the Reverend John Haynes Holmes. _For Humanism is a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic in temper, selective in practice, which makes its first concern, the self-perfecting of the individual._

There is still a third cause which must be touched on to explain the confusion that blankets the public mind. In the literary campaign staged against the New Humanists in the spring of 1930, the naturalistic writers employed an old debating trick:--to pretend bewilderment at the definitions offered and to press for closer and closer definitions. The aim apparently was to force the New Humanists at last into some utterly rigid statement of their creed, if not into some ultimate banality; therefore anything short of a completely rigid definition was called an inadequate one. But the New Humanist is too awake to the dangers of Neo-Classicism to yield to this type of pressure. Humanism lays the stress on the inner life, Neo-Classicism on the external conventions. The New Humanist maintains the seat of authority in himself: he studies with zeal the wisdom stored in tradition, but he insists on his internal corroboration of that wisdom as the all-important thing. He does not, that is, set up an authority, as the Neo-Classicist does, which is completely exterior to himself. Above all, he perceives the folly of an Age of Rules, which happens whenever Neo-Classicism gains ascendency. In short, if the New Humanism could be set forth in a perfectly dry detailed code, you may be certain that it would not be Humanism, but only another recurrence of Neo-Classicism. A true definition of Humanism must breathe with the vitality inherent in its subject.

The New Humanist, then, disassociates himself from the impoverishment of Neo-Classicism, from excessive purism, as consciously as he separates himself from indiscriminate humanitarianism and the mere inquisitiveness of the æsthetic type. As was said above, Humanism is a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic in temper, selective in practice, which makes its first concern, the self-perfecting of the individual. This sense for the term is not new or perverse; it has, in fact, long been emphasized as the following passage from a late Latin writer, Aulus Gellius, will show. Gellius was of a somewhat crabbed and pedantic temper: Babbitt admits this and adds that he was too much inclined to leave sympathy out altogether; but what is interesting is that in the decadence of Rome Gellius made complaint about the corruption of the term _humanitas_ to give it a humanitarian flavor. Here is his protest--it might have been written yesterday--against the confusion of humanism with humanitarianism.

“Those who created the Latin language,” the passage occurs in the _Noctes Atticae_, “and those who spoke it well do not give the word _humanitas_ the vulgar meaning which is synonymous with the Greek word _philanthropia_, which means an active kindness, a tender benevolence for all men. But they give the word the meaning which the Greeks attach to _paideia_, which we call education, knowledge of the fine arts. Those who show the most taste and disposition for these studies are the most worthy to be called _humanissimi_. For man alone among all living beings is able to devote himself to cultivating a study which for that reason has been called _humanitas_. Such is the meaning given to this by the ancients, particularly by Varro and Cicero. Almost all their works show examples, so I shall content myself with quoting one only. I have chosen the opening of the first book of Varro ‘Concerning Human Things’: _Praxiteles, qui propter artificium egregium nemini est paulum modo humaniori ignotus_ (Praxiteles, whose excellent talent as an artist has made him known to every man at all skilled in the arts). Here _humanior_ does not bear the vulgar meaning of easy, tractable, benevolent, even though lacking in knowledge of letters. That meaning would not express the author’s thought. It means an educated, a learned man, one who is acquainted with Praxiteles through books and history.”

* * * * *

What is the doctrine of the New Humanism? The most compact statement I have found was written by Robert Shafer in the course of a powerful polemical article in the _Bookman_. It deserves the most careful study by the reader, for from it can be extracted almost the whole of Humanism. It is a remarkably comprehensive formulation: despite its brevity it manages to imply all that a New Humanist has to say about his conception of man.

“Against romanticism, humanitarian sympathy, mechanistic or vitalistic determinism, the doctrine of progress and the like, has been opposed a skeptical criticism of life and letters which rests ultimately on the proposition that man differs not alone in complexity of organization, but in kind, from the animal, and that his happiness depends upon his recognition and cultivation of that element in his being which is distinctive of him. This is held to be possible; man is held to be, within limits, capable of responsible choice. This capacity is regarded as the core of the distinctively human element in man’s constitution, which is thus dual--‘animal,’ one may roughly say, united inexplicably with ‘something more,’ or the unlimited chaos of impressions and spontaneous desires united with the potential capacity of control and reduction to ordered activity. No conclusion is necessarily implied for or against the doctrine of grace, but insistence is steady that without a wisely directed educational discipline and a strict inner discipline man’s fulfilment of his proper end is certainly impossible. To choose is to discriminate, and, for this, habituation to self-restraint is essential; it is, indeed, the foundation on which the whole structure of distinctively human life rests.

“It is recognized that this general position is not susceptible of rational proof--reason itself being the organ of discrimination, and acting, when it acts legitimately, in a purely instrumental capacity. But none the less his position is, the humanist adds, irrefutable and soundly based. It concerns a realm of being into which ‘modern science’ simply does not enter. Exact science, so-called, is concerned with quantity--how much?--but about quality--how good?--it has nothing to say. The humanist is concerned, not with physical existence taken by itself, but with distinctively human excellence, or self-fulfilment, or, in a word, happiness. Here the one possible appeal is to actual human experience--the recorded experience of past generations and the inner experience of the individual disciplined and formed in the light of selective tradition. The strength of humanism lies in its positive experiential basis, which affords it, not an absolute, but a sufficient, authority.”

Could the sum and substance of Humanism be put more plainly than the above? The topic can be expanded, explained, illustrated, but in the end when it is boiled down again, we shall find that Robert Shafer has given the candid and accurate summary of its meaning. Greater rigidity would be inexact--remember that words like “idealism,” “skepticism,” “deism,” even “pragmatism” offer a similar necessary fluidity to the definer--for the thing defined has flowing contours and is alive with movement. What then is the difficulty many inquirers about Humanism confess to experiencing when it comes to seizing its import? Well, our difficulties with understanding definitions are not entirely with words; they are of two kinds: verbal and psychological. The first is more easily overcome: it requires simply a clear statement and attentive reading. In view of the fulness with which More and Babbitt, Foerster and Shafer and many others have written about the meaning of Humanism, there is no excuse whatever for any failure to grasp verbally what they are driving at. A college student could write it out on an examination paper. But the other kind of difficulty, the psychological obstacle to understanding, is the one that takes real effort to remove. By understanding a definition psychologically, I mean experiencing the definition. I mean relating it to one’s own experience or lack of experience. I mean filling the verbal signs with living personal content.

I will give one simple illustration of the gap between verbal understanding and psychological comprehension. A good deal of the vocabulary of warfare is used by both soldiers and civilians. The counters are the same, but what the soldier has experienced as the meaning of these words--“No-man’s Land,” “trenches,” “battle,” etc.--is radically different from the mere verbal associations the civilian makes with them. The soldier and the civilian try to converse: it is well known that the returned soldier quickly gives up and refuses to talk about his war experiences except to those who have had an actual taste of battle. The civilian wonders why the soldier is uncommunicative about the war and never guesses that it is partly because the soldier has become aware that what to him are signs of experience are to the civilian simply words, as we say.

Now in the case of Humanism this disparity in experience between the expounder and the listener does not exist. There is a ground of human experience common to all that can be appealed to. But how to reach it? Here the reader must exercise his good will, must be honest with himself, must make an effort to carry the interpretation over from words to experience, to take it out of the verbal forest of the mind and apply it to all his psychology. This means in many cases an effort against the habits of education we have received, for the latest reformers in education are correct in telling us that our civilization is too exclusively verbal, that we trust too much in words cut off from things. Such a psychological translation of the perfectly clear verbal answers already given to the question, what is twentieth century Humanism, I now propose to attempt.

* * * * *

_The final object of the New Humanist is happiness._ If he is asked, why discipline oneself, why try to live in a certain way, his candid reply is, to attain happiness. All his system-making is directed toward that end, and that end, happiness, happens to be one of the very few values unquestioned by human beings, for who in a state of happiness could conceivably question his own happiness?

Here there is practically no barrier to what I have called the psychological understanding or, perhaps better, realization of humanistic doctrine. For every one knows at first hand the state of happiness: it has come to him accidentally, it has been fleeting, but brief and chance as its visitations have been, the impression of them is indelible. We long all our lives to re-experience happiness, and we are incredibly ingenious in trying to find it. The cynical are no exception: their cynicism about happiness arises from repeated failures to rediscover it, and their real wish is still for that on which they pour (why so bitter?) ridicule.

Mankind universally hopes for happiness. It flees from the unhappy state and looks everywhere for the acknowledged good thing, the state of being happy. The sad platitude is that mankind fails first to find as much happiness as it wants, second, to maintain the state when it is experienced, and third, to gain an insight into the secrets of producing happiness. Not on happiness as the ultimate human value, but on the way to happiness, the means of procuring it, is there disagreement.

The majority--a fact that has always struck wise men with astonishment--have always depended on distractions and pleasures. They have situated the source of happiness in the world around them. They have felt that a change in the environment was what was needed. Make the world an Eden, say the reformers, and man will be happy. But the Garden of Eden, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is within, has been the retort of the sage.

The New Humanism commits itself first of all to a serious study of the principles of happiness. It does not dream of a geographical Paradise, but says, look to human nature! What is the constitution of human nature? How ought man to live according to this constitution? For in no other way but by obeying the laws of his being can he win an enduring happiness.

But here is where an apparent paradox deludes so many. Man is not born free, as Rousseau claimed, but born slave to things. Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, and mankind expects to be happy under those conditions. To change the conditions, to come out from servitude to things to a command over them--the aim of the religious and the humanistic alike--is so arduous and perilous a revolt that it looks like anything but the way to happiness. Man’s _inclination_ is to remain enslaved to things the while he hopes they will not ride him harshly. His _wish_ is to oppose his inclination to servitude, and to fight his way to psychological freedom. He cannot however imagine that he can be happy warring against his attachment to things. And yet Thoreau speaks for all the sagacious reflecters on life when he says: “But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

* * * * *

_The New Humanist maintains that human consciousness is dual._ This is the primary fact to be recognized, he says, in any quest of happiness. He expresses this fact by speaking of our two selves, which he calls the natural self and the human self, or the animal and human selves or the lower and higher self. In respect to this terminology, admittedly crude, it must be kept in mind that the New Humanist writes as a practical psychologist, not as a theoretical one who also has to drop technical language and speak in the world’s tongue when it comes to practical psychology, and it must be still more kept in mind that no moral connotations are meant by the terms. If I say that plants are a lower form of life than animals, I do not imply that plants are reprehensible for their lesser development--nor does the New Humanist regard the life of the body as morally inferior to, let us say, the life of the mind. The grading is made in the scientific spirit: it is based on measurement of life, not on moral requirements. The discrimination between lower and higher is psychological, and nothing else.

Surely, no elaborate documentation is needed to establish the fact that there is an overwhelming crowd of witnesses from antiquity onwards to the existence of a practical dualism in human psychology. Two eloquent writers will stand for the multitude: Cicero in antiquity and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. They can be combined in a single quotation from the latter’s _Literature and Dogma_. “Man alone of living creatures, Cicero says, goes feeling after ‘the discovery of an _order_, a law of _good taste_, a _measure_ for his words and actions.’ Other creatures submissively follow the law of their nature; man alone has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent of his nature.” That is, a goldfish or a wren or a crocodile or a cat is always true to its species. Nature looks to it that they obey, as it were, the conscience of their species. They behave strictly as they should, being what they are. They are loyal to themselves. But man is not so completely cared for. He belongs to a very elastic species: his behavior can vary enormously and fall far away from the norm of the race. We have words to indicate this drop from what we instinctively feel man should be, such words as “bestial,” “sub-human,” “inhuman,” “unmanly,” and the like. Nature apparently is interested in man only up to a certain point, giving him a human form, the capacity to feel, the ability to think, but for all Nature cares, he may be as disordered as he pleases in his emotional and mental life. An idiot, from the standpoint of Nature, is as good as a genius. From this arises man’s sense of division in himself. He is a natural creature; true; but add that in comparison with the beasts and their constant observance of their laws he appears a crazed natural creature. But, a strange thing, he has the intuition that he also has the possibility of becoming a sane creature. Only--he himself must learn what sanity is, what its laws are and how to follow them.

He has, in Arnold’s words, “the notion of a whole self as opposed to a partial self, a best self to an inferior, to a momentary self a permanent self requiring the restraint of impulses a man would naturally have indulged;--because by _attending_ to his life, man found it had a scope beyond the wants of the present moment.” I wish to bring home, if I can, the nature of what is here called our partial, inferior, momentary self, and to do so I shall call upon the studies of the Behavioristic psychologists. What the New Humanist terms our lower natural self is in my opinion best named our mechanical self.

The Behaviorists consider man to be a behaving mechanism. Man has nothing to say about his heredity, his birth, his early environment, the language and customs he is taught, and so forth. He comes into the world with the native disposition to make certain responses (unlearned responses) and he soon is trained on the basis of these to make thousands of others (conditioned responses), often of a very arbitrary character. A response-mechanism set ticking and continued in motion by the ceaseless impact of stimuli from the environment.

Physiologically, we are, every one admits, best viewed as machines. Our tissues repair themselves, our blood flows through an elaborate system whose tracings we know only by hearsay (i.e., by diagram), our nails and hair grow without our supervision, we are unaware of the functioning of organs like the liver, unless they get out of order,--but it is unnecessary to specify details of what every one grants: namely, that the ceaseless movements of our bodies do not depend very much on our accurate and intimate knowledge of them, nor upon our directive powers. We stand toward them in the relation of mechanician to machine, only we are rather poor mechanicians and in our ignorance frequently harm what we are supposed merely to tend.

But the Behaviorist enormously extends the reign of mechanics: he puts our psychology--or what we call our psychology--under mechanical rule, going so far as to reduce our emotions to visceral tensions and our thoughts to sub-vocal movements in the larynx. In this he is far more right than most people think. But we do not need to argue that out now. I refer to very obvious matters, such as the occurrence of emotions to us. _They occur to us_: we do not as a rule induce them. “A peculiar feeling came over me,” we say. It did! “I was seized by anger.” I was! “I was taken by surprise.” Right! Every day long we are swept by a succession of emotions, the majority of which clearly we had nothing to do with. We did not choose to experience them. They came to us.

Again there is a constant procession--better say jumble--of images, ideas, associations, words and nonsense in our minds. Our brains wander most of the time: they are as Arnold Bennett calls them “gentlemen-at-large” and deucedly unreliable. They go on operating after a fashion whether we will or not. And what is this but sheer mechanicality?

But this is our natural self, this is as biology and sociology have made us. We take stock of ourselves in adulthood and we find probably that we are a pronounced type--an intellectual, a highly emotional artist, a sportsman. Did we create our type, our particular psychological build, any more than we colored our eyes or invented the shoes we Westerners wear? Our temperament--did we make it or do we find ourselves with one?

A very great deal of what we call ourselves we have to consign to the Behaviorist and agree with him that it is determined. But the New Humanist will not yield all to Dr. John B. Watson and his relentless observers in the laboratory. He will not deny consciousness, nor the will, nor higher potentialities than are manifest in the animal self. He balances against the mechanical the human self which, he maintains, man can develop. What, more precisely than thus far stated, is meant by the human self? We can get at the conception if we think of our potentialities.

Actually, we are turned out by Nature and Society as uneven-sided human beings, not well-rounded ones. Actually, we are prejudiced and partial, not unprejudiced and impartial. Actually, our minds are enslaved, not free. Actually, we are nonsensical, not commonsensible. But we have the potentiality for all these things we have not,--for harmonious development of ourselves, for disinterestedness and impartiality, for the free intelligence and the most esoteric of all virtues, commonsense. Only none of these things ever comes to man as a gift. Each must be deliberately and laboriously acquired. Man, then, humanistically viewed, is born with a lower self but has a margin of potentiality which he, and only he, can cultivate, and by so doing he creates a higher self to which it is proper to give the name human. Acquirements, not gifts--that is the sure mark of the truly human. (Incidentally, the greatest of these acquirements is will, but of that later.)

At the risk of seeming unable to let go of the idea of a cleft between the natural man and self-perfected man, I will cite one illustration of the difference between our actual psychology and our potential psychology. Man has the possibility of simultaneous thought on several different subjects, but this possibility is never actualized by accident in the ordinary course of events. Ordinarily we think in succession, following a train of thought, as we say. But we can, by special training, learn to follow several lines of thought at once. One begins with very simple exercises (immensely difficult to the beginner, however), such as focussing on the movement of the second-hand of a watch, reciting a stanza of poetry, and running through a multiplication table at the same time, and then works up to what appear staggering exercises in mental gymnastics. For this sort of work, at which geniuses fail the first time as completely as the most ungifted, the natural self is of no avail. Simultaneous thought becomes an actuality only to those who themselves bring it to birth.

It seems strange that any one should deny on any practical basis the selves of the New Humanist’s conception: one, largely or altogether automatic, actual, natural, subject to the “law for thing,” the other acquired, born out of potentiality by one’s own effort, not natural but human, subject to the “law for man.” Yet this dualism has been fought throughout recorded history. Many gifted men have made frenzied efforts to deny the gap, to coalesce the two selves, to prove that man not only theoretically but practically must be monistic. One of the latest epical mass-movements to deny psychological dualism was Romanticism.

* * * * *

_Submission to the natural self is the Romantic attitude._ Here, I believe, we can strike rock bottom. As sketched above, a human being consists of three related modes of experience (sensations, emotions, and ideas) and in these three modes everything, according to the Behaviorist, a very great deal according to everybody, is done not by our consent and knowledge, but, as it were, by itself. But toward such a threefold apparatus for experiencing, an attitude may be assumed, and this attitude is fundamental in our psychology. Given one kind of attitude, and you get the foundation of Romanticism. Another attitude toward the selfsame creature, and you have laid the cornerstone of the humanistic life. Who or what takes the attitude? Whatever we mean by the word “I.” The Romanticist glories in identifying as closely as possible whatever the word “I” means with his mechanical self. He resigns his Ego to his organism. He submits to the riot of his senses, feelings and thoughts and calls the submission good.

It might be said, I suppose, that earlier in this book I scored an easy victory by putting in contrast a composite figure, quite lacking in “personality,” with Matthew Arnold. Of course, it might be retorted to me, Arnold is superior to any constructed representative of modern men. Arnold should rather be compared with some great Romantic, not with an instructive psychological chart. Very well: in the place of that poor G. R. we unfeelingly exposed, let us put Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the man of genius who preached so eloquently the surrender to our natural selves.

Irving Babbitt has often been accused of “Rousseauphobia.” I cannot find the justice in the accusation, which ignores Babbitt’s reasons for emphasizing Rousseau’s influence. Babbitt cannot be said to have slighted the precursors of Rousseau, such as Hutcheson and the Earl of Shaftesbury, or not to have put a great deal of weight on Francis Bacon as a founder of the modern world. And it is true, as Babbitt claims, that though Rousseauistic ideas were in the world long before Rousseau, it was the Genevan who gave them their great driving power in our era: it was Rousseau who cast the wonderful glamor over them that made them irresistible to modern man. Rousseau is the representative Romantic. He is the symbolic figure, and hence he is bound to appear very large in any treatment of Romanticism. Furthermore, the extent and depth of his influence can hardly be minimized, as the enormous literature written about him shows. Let it be Rousseau then to serve here, as in so many previous expositions, as the arch-exponent of the Romantic attitude.

He accepted the contradictions in himself, saying that his heart and his mind did not seem to belong to the same person. He scorned the intellect, the weakest and least developed of our three modes of experience, saying that the man who thinks is a depraved animal. He gave the primacy to feeling, and exalted sensation. He declared that man was corrupted by Society and that man was naturally good. He developed on his own account, as Maritain says, “a singular doctrine of absolute non-resistance to the impulses of sensation, a doctrine of complete passivity as the condition of full expansion of the primitive goodness, which is simply a natural quietism.” Yes; the “Father of the modern world” was an irresponsible. For he loved, nay he worshipped, that irresponsible creature, the natural self.

The natural self is innocent: that is, it is neither good nor bad. Good or bad can only appear in the attitude taken toward the natural self. The Romantic with all his enthusiasm follows the inclinations of the natural self. He shirks the disciplining of it. He wants unity but he thinks he can find unity by subsiding into the life of feeling and sensation, stilling the mind. He goes with Nature, like a child led by its nurse, and he calls it liberty.

At the end of Romanticism there is the pseudo-necromancer of Vienna with his complicated method for teaching the proud spirit of Man to stoop, to chain itself to the blind forces of his temperament, to forget in slavery to the senses and feelings that man is in essence a passion for perfection.

* * * * *

_Responsibility for the natural self is the Humanist attitude._ Like the Romanticist, the Humanist discovers that whatever is signified by the word “I”--and the determination of the signification of the word “I” is a poser for the infant science of psychology[5]--is attached to a surprising creature, unreasonable, expansive, changeable, an absorbing mystery to study. He finds furthermore that the creature has the complete upper hand so far as the “I” in it is concerned. But the Humanist cannot acquiesce in this arrangement. It seems to him that the creature is not wicked but certainly a fool. There is nothing wrong with its appetites, only the organism is singularly unintelligent in gratifying them. It is full of whims, some of them dangerous to the organism’s life. It loves to waste time in day-dreaming, to waste emotion in foolish anxieties, to waste energy in muscular fidgets. Clearly, the creature itself would be happier if it were under intelligent guidance, if it were taught to obey instead of always being given the reins and dashing away at random. Thus, the New Humanist feels that his real, deepest self is somewhat apart from his natural mechanical self. He wants to be the driver of his machine, not a mere intoxicated passenger in a runaway vehicle. He wants to be responsible for the manifestations of his personality. In responsibility for his natural self lies for him the dignity of man. This for him is the true liberty.

But how to attain and exercise this liberty? For, to begin with, the workings of the natural self are not known to the one who wishes to master it. Hence, the humanistic stress on self-study and self-knowledge. But further, even granting a fairly complete working knowledge of oneself, of what one’s biases and characteristic reactions are, what one’s defects and points of strength are, one may still be at a total loss, powerless to alter or control the spontaneous phenomena of the organism. Hence, the humanistic stress on the need for developing the will.

* * * * *

_The New Humanist upholds a creative conception of man._ The word “creative” has been so cheapened by Romantic usage in which it is made synonymous with mere temperamental overflow that one is almost inclined to drop the word until it loses its present indiscriminate associations. However, no other word will do to describe the humanistic conception of man, for in the Humanist’s view man literally creates his manliness. Man has to find his own center, develop his own potentialities, create his own order in his psychology.

We can put the matter thus. Every one without exception has felt that his psychology was organized about a principle of dispersion. His inclinations have pointed outwards; he wants to let himself go, he yearns to express himself. “You must be yourself,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau over and over, and in his mouth it meant what Maritain says it did. “You must _be_ your feeling, as God _is_ His being. Does God, Who is all act, need forming? You must regard as a sin every attempt to form yourself, or allow yourself to be formed, to right yourself, to bring your discords to unity again. Every form imposed on the inner world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a sacrilegious wrong to nature.” This is psychology based on the Many.

But just as there is a metaphysic of the One as well as the Many, so there is a psychology of the One. Every one without exception, I daresay, has felt in his psychology a principle of unity. He has experienced, that is, at various moments a strong wish to integrate himself, to pull himself together, to become a concentrated unified individual. It is with this wish the New Humanist identifies the human, and he pits it against the inclination to accept the discords. The wish for unity is the creative wish.

What could be more uncreative than the despising of the mind by Luther, Rousseau and scores of lesser Romantics? The mind, a part of our resources to be exploited along with the other parts--why should it be treated puritanically any more than the body should be despised? Again what can be more uncreative than to transfer the blame for one’s faults to Society, or to make a cult of inaction as Rousseau did? The New Humanist replies that the fault after all is not in our stars or in Society but in ourselves and that we must work upon ourselves--a genuinely creative attitude.

I direct attention again to human potentialities. Proportionateness--it must be created. The free intelligence--it must be struggled for. Disinterestedness--an ideal toward which no step is ever taken without effort. Commonsense, the fusion of mental, emotional and practical judgments--it must be striven for. Self-control--impossible without the use of will. The will--dormant, it must be awaked. Unity--it must be achieved.

These, according to the New Humanist, are some of our higher possibilities. He takes the attitude that a man’s work is to bring them towards fruition, that in so doing lies happiness, that by so doing one is truly creative, making and strengthening a human self to oppose and dominate the vagaries and weaknesses of the natural self.

VII

THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM

_“My whole method is experimental, or it might be less ambiguous
to say if the word were a fortunate one, experiential.”_--Irving
Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_.

It is obvious that the New Humanist does not think there is much insight in Walt Whitman’s line, “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” We can epitomize the preceding chapter and at the same time add a new element by extracting two sentences from Babbitt’s _Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Like all the great Greeks Aristotle recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure.” The new element, the law of measure, relates to discipline. I have dealt with the major conception in the Humanist doctrine: I have shown that the New Humanism is primarily individualistic and for the sake of individual growth: I described it as aristocratic in temper. The last is surely evident from the humanistic stress on the rule of our momentary ordinary selves by our best selves, and from the Humanist’s search in the inherited literatures for “the best that has been thought and uttered,” and finally from his making the question of leadership the paramount problem for democratic nations to solve. But in the general description of the New Humanism I noted in addition that it was a discipline and selective in practise, and these are the matters of this chapter.